1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of automated directory assistance.
2. Description of Related Art
The present invention relates generally to automated directory assistance.
Directory assistance ranges in the prior art from interfacing with a human operator who responds with telephone numbers associated with known parties, to automated methods such as Google Voice Local Search (Goog411), where a party may call an 800 number, request the specific telephone number of a particular business party, or a general category (e.g. “Greek restaurants in Los Angeles”), which will be recognized by automatic voice recognition means and a candidate vendor or number of candidates will be presented to the user for telephonic connection.
Call detail records can record for any telephone call the number of the caller, day, date, duration, disposition (e.g. busy/not busy), number of rings, connections and the like, by which companies can ascertain how often a particular telephone is called and other rudimentary data from call detail record data.
A directory, as used in computing and telephony, refers to a repository or database of information which is heavily optimized for reading. Commonly, a directory supports search and browsing in addition to simple lookups. Directories may be printed (e.g. print telephone directory) or electronic form (e.g. the internet website located at www.yellowpages.com.)
An expert system is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) application that uses a knowledge base of human expertise for problem solving. Its success is based on the quality of the data and rules obtained from the human expert. An expert system derives answers by running the knowledge base through an inference engine, which is software that interacts with the user and processes the results from the rules and data in the knowledge base. An expert system may be populated with information by the process of knowledge acquisition, which is the process of acquiring knowledge from a human expert for the expert system, and can be organized into IF-THEN rules, using a knowledge base, or some other form of knowledge representation. A knowledge base is a database of rules about a subject used in AI applications. A knowledge based expert system is an AI application that uses a database of knowledge about a subject.
Examples of expert systems include systems used in medical diagnosis, equipment repair, investment analysis, financial, estate and insurance planning, vehicle routing, contract bidding, production control and training.
Phone systems are communication channels connecting, either wirelessly or with wires, end users to one another, either in real-time voice or data interactions (i.e., transactions between end users occurring immediately) or batch-time processing (e.g. voice mail). A variety of hardware and software devices can be connected to the communication channels, including but not limited to land-line phones, wireless phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), computers connected to a packet network, including the internet (e.g. Skype) and the like.
Quality of Service (QOS) is a defined level of performance in a data communications system, typically as it relates to such technical factors as bandwidth and latency of a communications channel. However, for purposes more relevant to the present invention, Quality of Customer Service/Satisfaction (QOCS) can be generally defined as any arbitrary and/or predetermined measure of a business that uses telephony and interacts with the public, that is determined according to the ability of the business to provide consumers with desirable service, however desirable service may be subjectively and arbitrarily defined, and as defined further herein by a weighed relevancy methodology producing a relevancy score.
Telephone networks are dynamic networks that constantly evolve and change, not least because they are connected to human beings, networks, servers and devices that are constantly evolving and changing. The quality of service associated with businesses also changes, as businesses evolve over time. But in the prior art of directory assistance, there is presently no way of dynamically, over time, automatically acquiring, storing, managing, and disseminating information about, and measuring the Quality of Customer Service/Satisfaction (QOCS) in such a way as to give a prospective customer using directory assistance a measure of worth or the rating of a business being sought, even on a real-time basis. The present invention addresses this concern.